India and Thailand: Saving Jumbo

Niki McMorrough visits India and Thailand to see how elephant tourism is giving these great beasts a new lease of life - and helping reverse a worrying decline in their number.

Game on: various tourist-themed initiatives are helping to restore elephant numbers

12:01AM BST 13 Jul 2005

"Parp," said Wanali the elephant, tackling the 20lb of sugar cane I had brought for her. "Pheep." This was our usual early-morning conversation. I already knew her next moves - she'd be unruly as I rode her in from the forest and then ignore me until I give her the first bath of the day. After a second breakfast, she'd do anything I asked - sit down, stand up, roll over. Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.

After a long history of hauling logs, transporting royals and braving battles, many Asian elephants are enjoying a career change, and a new wave of "elephant tourism" now lets elephant aficionados encounter the animals, be they wild or tame, individuals or herds, in a variety of ways.

There are not many elephants left. Tame ones and their lifelong mahouts, or trainers, have to be entrepreneurial to survive. Wild herds will become extinct if left unprotected, both in Asia and Africa. Ironically, when logging and sawmills became illegal in 1989, the law that was meant to protect their forest environment destroyed many - they became unemployed and unable to support their vast appetite. Some went freelance, others were employed by elephant camps, and some ended up in hospital. The wild elephant population of Asia has dwindled so much that efforts now have to be made to sustain it. Money to repopulate the herds is most likely to come from tourism.

Elephants can be found in streets and temples all over Asia and the sub-continent. My first encounter was with Lakshmi, the temple elephant in Hampi, southern India. I queued and paid a rupee to be touched gently by her trunk, regarded as a holy blessing - though it gave me the giggles. Later that month, I met Ganesh, the roving equivalent, sticking his nose into people's businesses in Madurai, and blessing them through their open doorways. Pilgrims shuffling down the street bowed before him, offering his favourite snack - whole cabbages. I felt it wise to avoid walking behind.

Sadly, it's also common to find the animals being exploited. I wanted to give a piece of my mind to the cruel whip-crackers forcing poor, crippled Krishna through Madurai's holy temple. I heard here that some elephants are given drugs - to which they can become addicted - to make them work harder. Instead, I bit my lip and reported the event to the Friends of the Asian Elephant (FAE) hospital.

Upon visiting the Mae Sa elephant camp in Thailand, I met the talented Wanpen, who has been painting (yes, painting) with wistful concentration for more than six years. Though she began with abstract and impressionistic work, she is now entering her "realist" phase and apparently prefers to create images of trees and flowers. She is the star pupil of the not-for-profit Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project (AEACP), which showcases artistic elephants from Cambodia, India, Thailand, Bali and Borbudur. Their work has been exhibited in Sydney, Venice and the US and has sold for up to £20,000 a piece, though some works can be snapped up for as little as £20.

After Wanpen had shown us her talents, she primly picked up her paint box and walked away. In trooped her colleagues, who are pretty nifty at football, for a game of sudden death with a difference. Each player had five legs (if you included their noses), the ball was extra large, and the reward was sugar cane rather than a trophy. The elephants seemed to be happy, getting some exercise and doing their job all at once. Circus-like? Perhaps, but the elephants were clean, well-fed and remained in close contact with their mums and aunties, as nature intended.

Continuing my elephant infatuation, I moved into the homestay at the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre (TECC), in Lampang, where there is a mahout training school. I collected my "uniform" and learnt a few Thai words that would allegedly make me the master of my steed. With visions of Barbara Woodhouse, I barked "Geb Bone" and "Tag Leung", but didn't for a minute think my elephant would "pass me" things or "bow down" before me.

I didn't get along with my first elephant, Hantawan, who was old, slow and not at all frisky. Amid all the shouting of instructions from the other trainees at their elephants, Hantawan remained mostly motionless and calm. I multi-tasked, tipping a couple of pounds of sunflower seeds into her trunk while munching on a pineapple, gripping her temples with my knees and holding down a conversation with an American woman. She actually owned an elephant, and was on her third visit of the year. When Hantawan eventually sat down and refused to move (due to indigestion, I was told), the American advised, "you should ask them to let you ride Wanali. She's the cutest. She likes to have her tongue tickled and she's the princess's elephant."

Young Wanali was covered in prickly hair and was extra-spiky in the mornings, but I soon got used to it. At first I was thrown by her swerving and speed-walking as I rode her from the forest to the camp for breakfast. Nor did she give much warning before plunging into the lake for a dip, and I was soaked through when she bobbed her whole head, with me on top, under the green gloop. As I tried to steer her out, I remembered the advice of my friend, David: "You steer by sticking your toes in their ears; but be careful, you could lose a shoe in there."

Wanali was the cleanest elephant in the camp. This was because she dunked herself (and me) four times daily, leaving me so chilly that my hands were as blue as my mahout overalls. I finally got the knack of avoiding a dip, shuffling backwards and forwards as she submerged different body parts in turn.

To warm myself up, I strolled along to the FAE elephant hospital, founded by Soraida Salwala, who, at the age of eight, had come across Uncle Elephant dying in the road because of a hit-and-run truck. The hospital is not for the faint-hearted - you should see the size of the syringes and bandages. Motala, a landmine survivor who'd had her front paw blown off, was swaying sorrowfully from side to side. Other animals tumble into city manholes, and many, inevitably, suffer from the gunshots of illegal hunters. It's not all bad news, though: incredible care - and a lot of money - has seen 900 injured elephants from the hospital returned home or admitted to elephant camps.

To help with their huge living expenses, elephants literally print their own money. At one point at the TECC, I found myself up to my elbows in elephant excrement, which is cleaned, mixed with fabric conditioner and turned into fancy paper that sells for 75 baht (£1) per sheet. Elephants chomp 330lb of vegetation per day, so that's a lot of potential paper.

Elephants are not the only victims. In Laos, where there are fewer than 1,000 elephants, Mr Bounthanom, of Ban Na, near Vientiane, told me how "our villagers were going hungry after a herd of 30 elephants savaged their sugar-cane crops. People were afraid to go into the forest to collect food and gather bamboo for their basket-weaving industry. Animosity developed towards the elephants and people began poaching them for their tusks and toenails." Klaus Schwettman, director of the National Tourist Association in Vientiane, came to the rescue with a Unesco-funded operation designed to help people and animals co-exist, and to use elephant eco-tourism to compensate their income loss and discourage the hunters.

I was excited to be among the first to sleep with wild elephants at the recently opened Elephant Observation Tower. Expecting a rickety, roofless bamboo platform, we found a towering "house" on 30ft concrete stilts with solar power and an ensuite loo. After dinner and a sunset amble, we settled down for the evening as the forest began to hum with life. Eerie hooting skimmed across the bamboo treetops, and in the distance came the sound of timber snapping and splintering. Then I heard trumpeting - and again, minutes later, though much closer. The elephants were heading our way. A lone bull, among others, arrived and lay down to a night of loud snoring, interspersed with bouts of huffing and splashing in the water hole.